Tech

3 challenges keeping Amazon’s delivery drones from taking flight

The promise of Amazon's Prime Air drone delivery service as depicted in a video released on Sunday is incredibly exciting. Taken at face value, this could represent the first real introduction of robotic devices into the mainstream as a consumer service – flying robotic delivery agents!

But hold on. Let's take a moment and pump our collective brakes to consider just how Prime Air will or won't actually work when it eventually takes off. The videos look cool and all (very sci-fi), but is Prime Air really practical?

Delivery execution

You may already know and enjoy Amazon's efficient inventory system that serves your online shopping fetish, but you may be less aware of the fact that robotic devices are integral to Amazon's warehouse operations. Alongside human workers, the company leans heavily upon tiny robots to move items within its shipping centers. So it only makes sense that Amazon would try to bring that kind of efficiency to the outside world. But the problem is that the outside world isn't a controlled environment like a warehouse.

In the video shown on Sunday, we see the Amazon drone land atop an Amazon logo situated in a consumer's yard. The video even shows a drone's eye view as it scans for a landing zone and, in this case, locks in on the Amazon logo on the ground. Is that ground-based Amazon logo necessary? The video shows the buyer picking up the square logo and taking it back into the house after the delivery, which indicates that a place marker may indeed be necessary.

Also, if a yard is necessary, what about the many consumers who don't have a front or back yard? Will apartment dwellers get cut out of the drone delivery fun? Yes, the delivery in the video looks great, but these are all important issues that individually or collectively make drone deliveries less practical than current methods.

One potential solution for apartment dwellers could be drone ports based at Amazon Locker convenience store locations. This growing network of package pick-up waystations could immediately serve as an easy way to include apartment dwellers with no drone landing space.

Air traffic concerns

For the moment, let's assume that the only people eligible for the first drone deliveries will need front or back yards at their homes. Assuming the drones have landing spots, there's the matter of regulating air traffic for potentially thousands of airborne deliveries in a single neighborhood. Once you factor in things like local news helicopters, power and phone lines and, of course, high flying drones from amateur users, filling the skies with Amazon delivery drones suddenly seems a lot more complicated.

In its most recent presentation, the company says that the drones will have "sophisticated 'sense and avoid' technology." But in a world in which even self-driving cars are still not officially allowed on most roads, that may be little comfort to city residents. And despite Amazon's optimistic approach, it appears that the company does understand the challenges involved in deploying such a system, and it listed those concerns in recommendation papers accompanying the Prime Air presentation.

To illustrate the idea, Amazon even offers a graphic, outlining how the airspace would be divided up. The paper goes on to suggest a "No Fly Zone," between 400 and 500 feet, in which drone operators would be prohibited from flying unless it was an emergency.

But still, even with the FAA and Amazon itself devoting a good deal of attention to drone safety, the challenges are significant — and Amazon knows this. In fact, for all the videos and talk of the future on the Prime Air website, the most sobering passage regarding the drone delivery program comes from Amazon itself.

Until that paradigm shift happens, Prime Air may just be "Prime Imagination."

Are flying delivery trucks safe?

Finally, there's the issue of safety. Even if Amazon can somehow surmount the aforementioned issues associated delivery execution and air traffic in heavily populated areas, those accomplishments won't necessarily make drone deliveries "safe."

Just this week, we learned about a child in England who lost one of his eyes because of a mishap with an amateur drone operator. In that case, the drone had dangerously uncovered propeller blades, was operated by remote control (not automated systems) and had no obstacle avoidance sensors.

But even with all of those caveats, and a situation vastly different from what Amazon is proposing, the threat of potential commercial drone mishaps can't be ignored. If a UPS or FedEx delivery truck hits a pedestrian crossing the street, a human is often directly accountable. But if the same thing happens with an automated drone, or any service robot for that matter, the only place to look for answers is to the large, faceless corporation, which, depending on the circumstances, may or may not accept blame for the accident.

A drone's eye view of the Prime Air sensors and navigation display in action.

Image: amazon

This matter of robotic devices, from flying drones to self-driving cars, operating alongside humans and being trusted to perform safely, is brand new territory, and not an area the tech industry can simply "disrupt" its way into. The stakes here are the highest: human lives.

And beyond the issue of unforeseen technical and human errors that may result in accidents, there's also the unpredictable nature of the weather. Whether it's snow, driving rain or a sudden lightning storm, trusting the safety sensors of Amazon's Prime Air drones in rough weather will also come with a significant set of risks to human life and property.

For its part, Amazon says, "We will not launch Prime Air until we are able to demonstrate safe operations." That's good news for anyone living in a major city, but not so great news for anyone excited about Prime Air.

Will Prime Air fly?

Taking everything we've covered here into account, the only conclusion left is that Prime Air may look a lot more realistic after this latest video, but any reliably safe and efficient launch of Prime Air is probably far into the future.

When contacted for answers to some of these questions, an Amazon spokesperson opted to refer us to the existing material already available on the Prime Air website. At this point, those answers simply aren't enough to make Prime Air seem like much more than a very cool concept idea.

But as we mentioned before, Amazon loves using robots to make getting products to consumers easier, and the company's CEO, Jeff Bezos, just showed off his controlled re-entry rocket space ambitions. So just because Prime Air may be hard to execute, we shouldn't assume that it won't become a reality — some day.

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